


And It Hurt

by IneffableDoll



Series: Ineffable Confessions of Love [28]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Asexual Aziraphale (Good Omens), Asexual Crowley (Good Omens), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hugs, Hurt Aziraphale (Good Omens), Hurt/Comfort, I am actually the worst who let me write this, I hurt my poor dears and deserve the worst of punishments for it, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Love Confessions, Other, Swearing, it’s a happy ending you really have to earn I’m afraid, many descriptions of metaphysical pain, they love each other and the type of love is irrelevant so read it however you like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:40:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29640351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IneffableDoll/pseuds/IneffableDoll
Summary: Aziraphale can sense love, but it was never supposed to be like this. The love was never supposed to be for him, for an angel, for beings loved only by God. It was not supposed to grow and grow, the ashen forest of a single spark.It hurt. Crowley’s love hurt so much.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Ineffable Confessions of Love [28]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1714558
Comments: 30
Kudos: 113
Collections: Aspec-friendly Good Omens





	And It Hurt

**Author's Note:**

> Today’s fic is bought to you by the reminder that I used to write primarily angst before I wrote fan fiction. I found this unfinished, extremely rude concept in a doc from last March and my poor, besotted heart decided I would not be able to breathe again until I’d fixed it. It needed a lot of rewriting (goodness, my writing has changed a lot in a year), not to mention a middle and conclusion, so…I did that. And now this exists. Don’t overthink the metaphysical rules here, I simply bend the laws of the universe to my will. Thanks to ICarryDeathonMyWings and thealienmeme for betaing!!  
> CW: There are multiple descriptions of pain here, and while they’re not super graphic or anything, they certainly aren’t pleasant. Worth being aware of.

Holy Love was best described as the absence of cold.

It wasn’t accurate to call it heat, for heat conjured images of an outward source. God, however, resided within all, and was all, and made all. As angels were beings carved of Love, God’s Holy Love was the usual state of being. There was no reason an angel would ever be metaphysically cold, not until their wings were aflame in sulphur – strangely, the coldest thing of all.

Because God was the structure of each individual, Her Love was internal. Outward love was an _excess_ of heat - no longer merely a lack of cold, but the more abstract presence of something like flames. Humans, in time, would find ways to express this; though they lacked the ability to sense Love the ways angels could, they understood it, and those that felt humanly love most strongly could see the outer fringes of what angels understood as a constant. Heart-warming, one might say, not understanding just how close they were to reality.

Outward love was nothing but a brief, temporary inclination to the angels that sensed it, this emotional bond between the humans of the Earth, and for the plants and animals and objects and places and ideas that existed in tandem.

There was another type, however.

The angel Aziraphale was assigned to the Eastern Gate of Eden. He felt his own divine regard swell for the first humans as they explored the Garden, as they left it, and as he remained behind wondering if he should have done something differently. The constant Love of God within his being was its usual dormant self, and yet, just before the first rainfall, in slithered a disturbance to the peace, a ripple that would spread to the edges of the pond of his experience.

All angels were Love, but never had they been loved.

“I gave it away!” Aziraphale admitted in a frenzy of anxiety, wringing his hands. He didn’t know if it was Wrong, or Right, or if it was too late to matter, but saying it aloud was a release, the sharing of a burden. He might’ve missed the expression on the demon’s face were it not for the sudden sensation of _heat_ that suddenly sparked in his core.

It wasn’t much. It was very small, in fact, like sunbathing on an overcast day in late spring. Not yet summer, and the sun was shyly tucked behind clouds. His toes were a bit cold in the grass, but there was an undeniable tranquillity.

Whatever it was, it was new. Aziraphale thought of how Adam’s love for Eve had felt, and vice versa, to his ethereal senses and struggled to place what radiated from Crawly in his compendium of how these feelings worked. There was a similar undercurrent to them both, yet what Crawly felt, Aziraphale sensed differently.

Aziraphale spent the next couple of centuries pondering what the sensation was, why he grew over-warm when he spoke with the demon on the wall. He knew, deep down, it was something related to God’s Love, but somehow, it was not the same. It wasn’t all-encompassing, it didn’t buzz in the air and the plants and his core. It wasn’t the Way Of Things.

And it was a _directional_ warmth.

The next time he saw the demon, it grew stronger, warmer. The clouds passed and the sun beat down on his brow, but the shade of a tree kept it from burning him. It was outside the Ark, the only one worth mentioning, that the feeling steadied, and Aziraphale marvelled at how comfortable it felt. Bare feet in the cool grass, dappled sunlight on his chest, a cool breeze brushing his cheeks. 

But it grew.

Every time he saw Crowley, he radiated with heat, something contradictory to the natural cold inside all demons. Aziraphale didn’t think Crowley knew he was doing it – it wasn’t a demonic trick. At least, not a conscious one. Yet, it seemed somehow _incomplete,_ and the sensation of wrongness sat like a stone upon his lungs, making him feel as though he needed to breathe but couldn’t. 

Aziraphale adjusted each time he felt it growing. He never knew what to make of it, why it was there and why it got stronger and stronger, but he had no recourse to remove or redirect it – and why should he? It was clearly something associated with God, so it couldn’t be bad…right? Why it came from Crowley, and why it felt so close to Holy Love, and yet, nothing like it at all…he couldn’t say.

That is, until the passing of books on a blackout night, when the bombs blazed, and wars were lost and won. It was _Crowley’s_ Love, Aziraphale realized when the demon’s feet burned, and his own chest seared like it had caught aflame in the rubble of a church. Crowley loved him and had since the Beginning, and it had only grown and grown like an ashen forest touched by the smallest spark. An angel was never meant to be loved in this way, because God Loved them as She did all things, and that was supposed to be enough. Yet, the kind of love that discriminated and chose was all too human for an angel to experience. But he did.

And it _hurt._

It felt like Hellfire, and he ached in the soreness of unused muscles strained to the limit. It was the dry burn in the brine of his lungs, the choking embers swarming the air, and the molten marrow simmering in his bones.

And there was nothing he could do.

He couldn’t very well tell Crowley to stop – as if the demon had that sort of ability at all. Emotions were not things one could manhandle and bend to one’s will. Aziraphale knew this, understood this – and yet, it seared away at the fraying edges of who he was, a love that his very existence rejected and couldn’t put anywhere. There was a constant fever to his person, his body buzzing under a sun that bore down on him in mid-July. No clouds to break the barrier, no shading trees, nothing but open sky and blaring UV rays hot enough to crack the flaking, red skin of a parched throat.

If Aziraphale had been a good angel, he would have smitten his problem eons ago. He might’ve walked away, and never spoken to Crowley to begin with – never let it get this far. It was his own fault for letting Crowley get too close, for letting Crowley see too deep. The best thing to do would be to step away and let this flame burn out.

Aziraphale could not do that, because he was selfish.

As a being made of love, he had long been aware of the love that radiated off his _own_ core, directionally, toward the demon in question. Caged and tied and locked, nestled beside his many secrets, and never allowed to glimpse the world.

Which made this all desperately inconvenient. And it hurt.

When they met again in the late sixties, Aziraphale hoped against his own heart that if he pushed Crowley away, just a shove – enough to separate and not to break – the pain might dissipate. What he didn’t expect was the _swell_ when Holy Water exchanged hands. The shocks of unutterable pain left him breathless, organs throbbing, and sympathetic to witches long burnt at the stake. He barely remembered what he said after that, only that he needed to get away, _away,_ as fast as angelically possible.

The eleven years leading up to Armageddon were the most painful he ever experienced. Every single day, it grew hotter, an inferno that consumed normalcy and drove Aziraphale to distraction. It was horrible, and it should have been wonderful. It should have been cherished. He was loved, but it was wrong, and he had to hate it because he had no choice.

(The unexpected wave of cold – and it felt like _cold_ – at the bandstand should have been a relief. It wasn’t.)

It had been Crowley’s idea, at least at first, but Aziraphale quickly built on it, and before they could change their minds, they reached out and clasped each other’s hand. Logically speaking, it shouldn’t have been so simple, as painless and natural as shedding one’s coat – but it was. They stood opposite each other, and opposite themselves. United once again, now in Crowley’s flat, side by side in the wrong corporations in the hopes of making things right. On their own terms.

Aziraphale shifted. He felt chilled, a hollowness deep inside where there had once been a steady outpouring of Divine Love. Now, in Crowley’s form, he was empty – there was no sense of constancy or trust or safety. Just cold, like a layer of frost over delicate green blades of grass. His ethereal senses felt distracted and confused, turning inside him in search of something that was not there, and hadn’t been for a very long time. Aziraphale wondered if Crowley’s occult senses still did the same.

And then, Crowley collapsed.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale shouted as the demon toppled over in the angel’s body, clutching at his chest and hyperventilating. He kneeled down beside him, vaguely registering how odd the motion felt in this body, and laid a hand on Crowley’s – his own – shoulder. “Crowley, are you in pain? What’s wrong?”

Crowley gasped for air he didn’t technically need, fingers clawing into his chest with those blue-green eyes blown wide. Crowley managed to shake his head, looking up at Aziraphale in confusion. “You…angel…” he huffed between breaths before swallowing visibly. “What _is_ this?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s so – so hot,” Crowley explained. “I feel like I’m on _fire_.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said in cold _, so cold,_ horrible understanding, fingers clenching at fabric. He should have realized – of _course_ Crowley could feel it, the feeling Aziraphale had carried for so long. “It – I’m sorry.”

“You…what?” Crowley ground out after a moment, face screwed up in discomfort. “Is it some reaction to me being in your corporation? It’s not burning away or something, is it?” He lifted Aziraphale’s hands and checked for signs of burn, an origin to the heat.

Aziraphale hesitated. He didn’t know how to explain this, but he…he could no longer hide the truth. “That’s _love,_ Crowley,” he whispered. “In my corporation, you must be able to sense it, now, just as I…no longer can, at the moment.”

Crowley froze and looked up, blinking as though waking himself. “I-I can sense love?”

“Yes. For now.”

Crowley paused, a symphony of emotions crossing his face at once. “Why does it hurt, Aziraphale?” he said softly. “Is love supposed to hurt like this?”

Aziraphale sighed. “An angel is not meant to be loved beyond what the Almighty deems upon them. So, that heat you feel is…ah…excess.”

Crowley’s eyebrows screwed up, not in pain, but confusion. “Excess?”

“Yes.”

“What does that…mean, exactly?”

Aziraphale studied his own Oxfords on Crowley’s borrowed feet. “No one is supposed to love angels except God Herself. What you are feeling is…is…” He didn’t want to say it. He couldn’t possibly tell Crowley that _his_ love for Aziraphale hurt him so much. It was too horrible to say. It broke his _own_ heart to know. He couldn’t tell Crowley, he just…he – he couldn’t. Crowley shouldn’t have to live with that the way Aziraphale did.

“Angel?” Crowley reached out a trembling hand as a tear slipped out of Aziraphale’s eye, but he didn’t let the desperate touch land. “Hey, what is it?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you. Not – not now.”

Crowley looked hurt, which was the opposite of what Aziraphale wanted. “Angel. We’re – you can’t just…” He took a steadying breath. “We have gone against Heaven and Hell today, rebelled against our superiors. We stopped _Armageddon_. You’ve trusted me to save you in your own stead, and you in mine. We can’t keep…” His voice cracked. “You can’t keep hiding things from me. _Please.”_

Aziraphale’s chest broke in two, and he couldn’t hold back a sob. “After. After, I _swear_ I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything. But I can’t. Not now.”

Aziraphale could tell Crowley was trying not to look as heartbroken as he felt, but he did a poor job of it. Aziraphale knew it to be a mirror of the expression on his own face, questions and pain neither could understand. Maybe they never would.

When Crowley walked Aziraphale into the Hellfire, the burn’s infernal cousin was a balm to Crowley’s own soul, the coldest flame a brief reprieve from the pain. It did nothing to soothe the deeper hurt.

Aziraphale, meanwhile, rose from Crowley’s bath and felt the Holy Water trailing down his borrowed skin, feeling each drip like a deep, internal loss. It was a poor substitute, anyway.

Back on Earth, they swapped, hand in hand, and Crowley stretched his fingers experimentally as Aziraphale adjusted all his clothing, as though ensuring it was all still there and just so. The sore ache settled against him like a constricting, familiar jacket, and Crowley breathed a long sigh of relief, twinged with something darker.

The truth needed to be said. It was that last trailing darkness that would taint whatever came next. The curse that love had brought them both. Aziraphale wished, so desperately, that he didn’t have to. He would do nearly anything to keep this terrible secret from Crowley and to go on as it was.

“Feeling better, now?” Aziraphale asked as Crowley ran a hand through his hair.

Crowley grunted noncommittally, sunglasses aimed away from him.

“I-I expect you’d like to – to…”

Crowley turned surprisingly soft but curious eyes on him, much softer than Aziraphale deserved and more curious than he could stand. “Angel, how long have you felt like that?”

Aziraphale blinked down at his folded hands. “Always. It’s gotten worse over time.”

“And what is it, then?” he pressed gently, almost tiredly. “If you’re gonna tell me now.”

Tears pricked at Aziraphale’s eyes. Oh, how he wished it was easy. That they could go out for dinner and drinks with smiles, that they could retire to the bookshop afterward and laugh together, that they could exist burdenless and light. However, Aziraphale’s very being was the price paid for six thousand years of mistakes. He felt sore, his heart a strained muscle. Finally, haltingly, he spoke. “It’s – it’s love,” he whispered. “The love I sense.”

“Yeah, got that,” Crowley replied.

“Y-Yours, that is.”

The demon’s body tensed beside him. “What?”

“It’s your love, Crowley. For me.”

Three terrifying heartbeats passed in silence. Aziraphale stared at the pigeons. “So. You know,” Crowley said hoarsely.

“I do. I realized it some decades ago.”

“Decades?” Crowley scoffed half-heartedly. “Bit…slow on the uptake.”

Aziraphale looked at him, then, eyes swimming with so much sorrow. “I have been, yes.”

Another long silence. Finally, Crowley let out a long, crackling breath. “Is it…does it hurt because I’m a _demon?”_ he asked, voice thick and more painful to hear than any heat in Aziraphale’s core.

“No,” Aziraphale whispered. “It isn’t you at all. Angels simply…aren’t meant to be loved.”

Crowley made a strangled sound, turning to Aziraphale abruptly with blazing eyes as he shoved his sunglasses up into his hair. “You’re kidding me, right?” he spat out, frustration scrawled in the lines across his forehead. “Angels are _literally beings of love.”_

Aziraphale tried to school his expression, to no avail. “Y-Yes, but that’s why – I mean, we’re supposed to give love, you see, not receive it-“

“That’s bullshit! That’s fucking bullshit!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t _apologize_ , that makes it so much worse,” Crowley grumbled, shoving the sunglasses back down and crossing his arms.

“But I – I didn’t want you to know,” Aziraphale persisted, “because this isn’t your fault, see, it’s just that I don’t deserve-“

Crowley held up a palm. “Don’t you _dare_ finish that sentence.”

“But-“

“Don’t. You. Dare.”

Aziraphale let out a breath and turned away, gazing up at the sky as though for guidance. But there was none, not for this. “What do we do, then?”

Crowley grunted. There was uncertainty in even that small sound, a betrayal of nerves and self-deprecating thoughts. “I won’t apologize,” he said softly. “I can’t stop loving you, angel. I don’t even know how I’d try.”

The pain in Aziraphale’s body spiked as it never had before. It was the worst sensation, like scalding irons and firebrands pressed into his back and arms and eyelids, scrawling signatures against his stomach lining. The physical sensation was nearly as painful as the knowledge that it should have been the most beautiful thing to hear, and it should have brought nothing but smiles and joy to his heart. Crowley’s love was so powerful that it shook his very being, and they should have been allowed to celebrate what they meant to each other, together, in a world of possibility. The culmination of six thousand years of secrecy, at an end. The ache of his body didn’t even compare to that.

Aziraphale wrapped his arms around himself, desperate to somehow contain it, to hide it, but he could feel Crowley’s eyes on him. He couldn’t bear to see the expression that must’ve been on Crowley’s face, knowing _why_ Aziraphale hurt and the role he unwillingly played in prolonging it with every wave of loving concern that echoed through the air. Seeing that might break him.

It was silent as Aziraphale gasped for breath. There must’ve been people, ducks and toddlers and London traffic, but it was quiet to him. Crowley placed a tentative hand on Aziraphale’s back and left it there. Finally, when Aziraphale felt himself somewhat under control, he said, eyes clenched shut, “I always wanted to tell you I love you. But I – I didn’t want it to be like this.”

And then.

Then, it was the _shade._

It was a balm to chapped lips, it was cold cream against a sunburn, it was an umbrella and a sheath of feathers blocking out the sun. But it was so much more. It was also a mirror, it was a reflection, it was the collecting of heat in the creases of palms and sharing it with the cold. An overflow, redirected, a diverging as sunbeams circled and spouted streams of pure love in a straight line, _outward._ Aziraphale felt the coil in his very core unravelling, spinning, and releasing.

Aziraphale opened his eyes and looked at Crowley. Awed and overwhelmed, he said weakly, desperately, hopefully, “Crowley, I love you.” Again, he burst open, all of that contained heat previously with nowhere to go swirling into the air and toward the object of his affection. It was Aziraphale’s Love, so long denied, escaping into the atmosphere in torrents.

Crowley looked like he’d been clocked over the head. “You – angel? Angel, what-“

The angel burst into joyous laughter, sitting up again as his jaw unclenched and his shoulders relaxed. “Crowley. Crowley, I love you so very much,” he said again, beaming wildly.

“I can – you – I _feel_ it,” Crowley stammered, pressing a hand to his chest, eyes wild. “I’ve never…I don’t…It’s _warm,_ angel.” There were tears in his voice. “It doesn’t hurt, it’s just – it’s warm. I…forgot what it was _like.”_

“Oh, Crowley.” Aziraphale blinked rapidly. “My love. My _love._ Say it again, _please.”_

“Say…” Crowley looked at him with wide eyes. “No! Angel, it _hurt_ you!”

“It won’t this time.”

“How do you know?”

“It won’t. You can’t hurt me.”

Crowley’s lower lip wobbled, and he pressed them together as though it might hide the vulnerability in his face. “You know I never would.”

Aziraphale’s heart swelled, and the heat – it was _bearable._ It wasn’t too much at all. There was the slightest stretch – a feeling of enveloped capacity and just the right fit of a snug shoe. It was, for the first time, Right. It was right, it was good, and it was okay.

Because it was _shared._

The two let out a simultaneous breath, eyes wide and unblinking as they stared at each other.

“What the fuck,” Crowley whispered.

“Erm, indeed,” Aziraphale agreed.

“Angel.”

“Yes?”

“Unless you stop me, I’m going to hug you now.”

Aziraphale didn’t stop him. In fact, he met him in the middle, and it was the newest, most familiar sensation, like something they had always done. There was something about the physicality of it, of supporting and being supported, that gave Aziraphale the greatest sense of safety. God’s Love had never made him feel this way. Hers was distant, and impersonal, and Crowley’s, for so long, had been a source of pain and turmoil…now, now, when it was spoken, when it was given and received and freely balanced, it was the freest and most soothing sensation in the world. The healing kiss to a scrape, and the loving truth of compatible, ineffable, eternal love.

“Crowley?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.” Release.

Crowley hummed. Acceptance. “Guess I love you, too.”

Aziraphale held him closer and let the heat of Crowley pressed against him settle his soul. Together, they would learn to trust a world where this was okay and that it would remain so. Aziraphale might not always believe it, but Crowley…he would always be there to remind him. They both needed time to learn how to be loved, though the loving itself was the easiest thing either of them had ever done.

God’s Love was best described as the absence of cold.

Crowley’s Love, to Aziraphale, was warm.


End file.
